


Fifteenth Christmas

by tatooedlaura



Series: Christmas [16]
Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 19:13:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10600407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatooedlaura/pseuds/tatooedlaura
Summary: One look at Mulder had her calling her mother to cancel plans for Christmas Eve and possibly Christmas Day.





	

One look at Mulder had her calling her mother to cancel plans for Christmas Eve and possibly Christmas Day. Maggie took it well, considering now Christmas dinner would be without both Dana and Charlie.

“At least Bill and Tara will be there and Dave and everyone else. You’re even getting Sarah and the kids so maybe pretend Charlie’s just in the bathroom the whole time.” She didn’t get the chuckle she was hoping for but at least she heard a resigned sigh that told her enough, “I’ll call you later when everyone gets there, okay? I love you.”

“I love you, too, honey. Please tell Fox to feel better.”

“I will.”

After hanging up, she moved back to the living room, where Mulder was curled on the couch, blankets piled high, sheen of sweat on his forehead but visibly shivering, chin wobbling, teeth clicking together in rhythmic spasm. Settling on the coffee table after having moved a mountain of computer printouts, magazines and newspapers from around the country, she brushed his forehead, the cold droplets feeling even cooler against his flaming skin, “how are you feeling?”

He couldn’t even come up with some kind of snarky comment, giving her a look of complete agony, “if you could shoot me now, that’d be great.”

Her heart squeezed, wanting to make him feel better but knowing that would only come in the next few days. With a small sigh, she tilted her head, a sad smile curving her lips, “they took my gun, remember?”

Groaning into the damp pillow, “then could you maybe grab me a new pillowcase and a towel? This thing is sticking to my face and feels terrible.”

Tucking in the blankets a little closer, she stood, “back in a minute.”

Soon, darkness had encased the house, the heavy blanket of snow muffling the world, the Christmas lights on the porch railing making the blank white canvas outside alive with color while inside, Scully struggled to get the star atop the tree. Mulder had designated himself ‘starman’ on the first Christmas he’d helped her decorate, given she struggled, needing to retrieve her kitchen stool, nearly falling into the tree reaching over to hang it and while Mulder enjoyed the view of her backside immensely, he declared it would be better for him to do it and her to direct him on balance and crooked issues.

This year, they’d waited longer than usual to get the tree up and now, with Mulder sick, she knew she’d have to do it herself.

All she had to say, in the end, was she was very glad she’d decided to do the star first instead of last. There was a miscalculation in distance and one thing leading to the next had her crashing into and through the tree, branches grabbing at her face and hair, poking her hard in the ribs and chest, digging sharply into her thighs as she landed heavily on the tree stand, metal bending, main trunk snapping, everything banging to the ground.

And Scully’s clear, heavenly voice, to Mulder’s ears anyway, spewing forth swears that echoed off the walls.

Mulder sat up in a shot, tangled in afghans, only to pass out from the sudden movement and his fever.

Through the branches, she watched his stand then fall. Her heart thumping wildly, she flailed, freeing herself from the tree and ignoring the bloody scratches all over her skin to stumble beside Mulder, “Mulder?! Mulder? Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”

When he didn’t respond, she slipped into doctoring mode, feeling his forehead, checking his breathing, examining his pupils for reaction. She was confident he’d wake in a minute and scooting to the kitchen to retrieve a wet washcloth and the thermometer, she returned to find him groaning, his limbs shifting haphazardly in ten different directions as he fought to sit up.

“Hey, hey, don’t move. You passed out and I don’t want you doing it again. Stay there for a minute.”

He complied, looking up at her, “did you fall into the tree?”

“Yeah. Apparently, I’m still too damn short to reach the top.”

“When are you going to grow some more?”

Running the cloth over his forehead and cheeks while she held the thermometer in his ear, “January 1st. My New Year’s resolution is to reach a nice 5’5”.” Seeing his temperature up in the 102 degree area, she slid her arm under his shoulder, “come on. I’m taking you to bed.”

“I don’t think I have the strength for sex right now but I could probably just lay there if you want to do the work.”

Shaking her head with a smirk, “still making jokes with a temperature like yours is impressive.”

“Who’s joking?”

Ignoring him now, she helped him sit up and waited while he swayed, then stood him up, working them both towards the stairs and eventually, slowly, up to their room. Settling him under the covers, she pushed his damp hair back, “time for meds and sleep. Back in a minute.”

&&&&&&&&&&

He slept soundly for several hours, giving Scully time to clean up the tree, clean up her numerous wounds, clean up the scattered tissue and other sick Mulder remnants before going to bed herself. Nearly asleep 20 minutes later, she felt his foot hit her calf. Figuring he’d just twitched, she ignored it.

A few seconds later, he hit her again, then his balled fist caught her shoulder. Scooting, sliding, slipping out of bed before she took anymore abuse, she saw him drenched in sweat, legs shifting under the covers, head thrashing about on his pillow.

Mumbling ‘shit’ under her breath, she began her first very long night in many years quieting her partner down, holding compresses to his face, whispering soothing words while she worried beside him. She listened to nonsensical words and mumblings about cases 12 years behind them; heard wild theories about everything from the UPS man spying on them to the possibility that we already colonized Mars but the government refused to tell the public about it.

She knew Mulder as well as she knew herself but that night gave her insight into just how deep his paranoia ran.

By morning, he’d settled down some and exhausted as she was, she attempted, yet again, to get him to drink some water. He was dehydrated at this point, his sweating less, his panting more but when she raised the mug to his mouth, he lashed out, the ceramic shattering as it hit the wall, the water soaking her and the sheets. Knowing she couldn’t leave him alone but that he would need an IV for fluids, she swallowed her pride and the knowledge that when Mulder was well again, he’d probably be thoroughly pissed at her but she called one of the nurses she knew at the hospital, Jenny, and politely asked if the woman could take time out from her Christmas Eve preparations to drop off several bags of saline, some tubing and needles. Explaining about her partner’s severe flu and not being able to leave him, Jenny obliged without hesitation, showing up less than an hour later with the supplies and a sympathetic look on her face.

She stared a moment too long as Scully’s scratched face and hands, however, “Dana, what happened?”

Scully nearly laughed, having sudden visions of Jenny thinking she was in an abuse relationship with a drug addled man who she was withdrawling at home. Ushering the woman off the front porch and inside for a few moments, she gestured to the pile of misshapen artificial tree sitting inside the door, Scully not having been able to get it outside to the garage in the snow, “Fox usually does the star on the tree but since he’s ill, I tried and I’m really too short to do it and I fell right through the tree and scratched myself and well,” glancing down at the metal and plastic heap, “that’s my Christmas tree this year.”

Understanding, Jenny returned to her sympathetic face, “I’m sorry. Your Christmas doesn’t seem to be shaping up well this year.”

With a moment of dawning, she gave her colleague a smile, “it’s okay. I have my Fox and that’s all I need, Christmas or any other time of the year.”

Turning to go, she gave Scully a grin, “glad you feel that way but if I tried to get away without a tree at my house, my kids would tie me up and decorate me with the lights and the tinsel and leave me there for the duration of the holidays.”

With a chuckle, she wished the woman ‘Merry Christmas’ and thanked her again before closing out the cold of the brisk afternoon and heading back upstairs, hoping Mulder hadn’t hurt himself in the few minutes she was gone.

&&&&&&&&

In the middle of the night, Scully, dozing beside him, woke when he began mumbling, hands and feet shifting under the covers, not harshly as before but slow and soft, brushing her arms, legs, knuckles running into her cheek, stopping their pursuit of her once they found their destination. Thinking he was waking up, his fever broken, she froze in utter terror when he opened his eyes to look at her, his head turned, his voice an urgent whisper, “they’re here!”

Scrambling backwards and out of bed in a daze, he tried to follow her, the saline bag she’d rigged to hang from the headboard swinging, then dropping to the bed as he moved. The calm, rational look in his eye made her heart thud heavy, erratic as she wondered how she would get him to the car and on the road, drive to one of the sheltered stashes compliments of the Gunmen that she hadn’t thought about in years.

She would have bet hard money he was awake.

“Mulder?! Mulder? Who’s here?”

Kneeling on the sea of tangled sheets and quilt, he stared hard at her, forehead scrunched in confusion, “they are. They all are. They’re behind the doors and in the closet and coming in the front door right now. Can’t you hear them? They’re breathing through their masks and they’re rattling.” Leaning even more towards her, “they rattle. Our atmosphere is too thick for them but the masks let them move around.” Pointing behind him, he twisted his arm far enough that the tape pulled, the IV slid from his vein and saline began shooting from the tube while blood began running down his arm.

He didn’t seem to notice however and when Scully automatically moved forward, wanting to calm him down but seemingly moving too fast, Mulder grabbed her arms, a triumphant look on his face as he turned his face towards the door, yelling, “Scully!! Scully!! Come here! I got one! He was fast but I got one! Come see him!”

Near tears, all she could do was wiggle her hand until it could press over his leaking cut, putting pressure on it, feeling the blood, from the tension in his muscles, pouring out faster than it normally would. “Mulder? Mulder, I’m right here. It’s me. I’m right here. You have me. You didn’t catch one of them … you have me. Mulder, it’s me.”

She repeated, slowly and quietly, his name, her name, over and over, the syllables becoming a nonsensical stream of sound as she spoke, her brain racking on what else, anything else she could do. He kept yelling over her thought, becoming more and more agitated as he called her name, demanding she come upstairs to see what he had.

Minutes, seconds, hours, decades, moments later, her mouth dry, his voice nearly gone from yelling, she decided she would have to take him down like a suspect, treat him like a common criminal with a kick and a back twist of his arm, unless he responded to one last ditch effort.

“You’re scaring William, Mulder. He’s asleep in the next room and he’s going to wake up. He’s going to hear you and he’s going to be afraid. You need to let me go and be quiet.” Now the tears were pouring down her cheeks, “Mulder, you don’t want to scare William. He’s your son, Mulder, you can’t scare him like this. Mulder, please?”

Something in the name William seeped through the chaos, the scattered remains of Mulder’s sanity and managing to break through, she saw recognition on his face for a split second and knowing she nearly had him back, “Mulder, I need you to lie down, okay? You had a nightmare and pulled out your IV and you need to lay down so I can take care of you? Do you understand, Mulder?”

His fevered mind finally clicked over, “Scully?”

Nearly collapsing against him, she held strong, even as her heart continued to tear at having mentioned her son’s name out loud so many times in such a short span, “it’s me. Can you lie down, please?”

He obliged without argument, his eyes searching hers but finding only despairing fear, he grew scared, “what did I do?”

&&&&&&&&

He insisted she not sleep in bed with him. He insisted she shut and lock the bedroom door with him inside. He insisted that she go to her mother’s and leave him behind, let him damage himself instead of her.

She told him to ‘shut up’ in the politest voice she had, then called the pharmacy with a prescription for something to help him sleep deeper, dreamlessly, as well as something stronger to combat the fever. She reinserted the IV after he threw up the small amount of water she gave him to drink, changed the soaked sheets, re-fluffed his pillow, stroked his forehead and told him it would take her 20 minutes, there and back, to the drug store and she’d need to leave him alone in that time.

She asked him to try to stay awake for her, just so he wouldn’t have another nightmare while she was gone and he nodded his glassy, fevered eyes in her direction, asking for his Rubik’s Cube from the dresser, “if I try that, I might stay awake.”

Leaving him, she made it to the car before she broke, 11:52pm, nearly Christmas Day and she wasn’t wrapping gifts and cuddling by the tree but speeding into the night, thanking God over and over in a constant mumble of appreciation that she found a drugstore open when the rest of the world was shut up tight for the holiday.

Swiping at her cheeks every few minutes, she made it there and home in 1020 seconds, having counted each and every one of them in turn, finally running up the stairs to find Mulder’s toy fallen to the mattress but no Mulder. Panic flooded her until she heard his low groan from the bathroom, his unmistakable ‘I’ve just thrown up all my organs’ sound that had her pushing the door open slowly, medicine in hand, “Mulder?”

He was still hugging the toilet, back curled as his muscles tensed, the sound guttural as nothing came up but not for lack of trying. She could only run her hand over his chilled skin, offering him palpable comfort when words would mean nothing, waiting until he finally sat back on his heels, IV trailing down to the liquid bag on the floor, “ready to go back to bed?”

“Can’t you just leave me here? I can sleep on the bathmat.”

Arm under his, she helped him up, “come on. I’ve got something to help the fever and calm your stomach down. If it works, then I have something that’ll get you to sleep but you won’t dream.”

Looking at her as if she were an angel, “they make things like that?”

“Yeah, they do.” Moving the hair sweat-plastered to his forehead and with a look of complete and utter sympathy, “but since you’re not keeping anything down, I’m going to have to do this a different way.”

Mulder groaned then rolled to his side, “the things you’d never thought you’d be doing to me when you walked in that basement office.”

As she pulled out the pill bottles and a pair of rubber gloves, “I loved you pretty much from the first day so even though I may have never thought about having to do this, I would have still done it in a heartbeat if it would have made you feel better.”

“Suppositories: Bringing together lovelorn FBI agents since 1993.”

&&&&&&&&&&

He didn’t throw up again, managing to keep down water and Pedialyte an hour later. His fever was hovering around 100 by the morning and having refused the sleeping pills, he drifted off on his own, Scully quietly lying beside him, hand on his chest, fingers on his carotid artery, soothed by the now steady, thrumming heartbeat of one finally on the slow mend.

They slept through the day, Mulder only getting up twice, once to pee and responding to a text Scully had received from Maggie, the second to retrieve her unwrapped ornament from his sock drawer. Exhausted, he debated for half a second whether to find some Christmas paper to wrap it up then climbed back into bed, instead hanging the ornament where the galaxy usually spun, putting the older ornament carefully in the nightstand drawer, just in case he went all hallucinatory again and managed to break it.

&&&&&&&&&&

She woke him up with a kiss to the cheek originally intended to check his temperature but he felt her, recognized her, moved towards her unconsciously, breathing her in, “hi.”

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

“Like someone beat me with some rebar, then ran me over with a steamshovel.”

“Oddly, I can imagine what that feels like.” Scooting a little closer, she also ran her lips over his forehead, “you seem much cooler than earlier.”

“The buzzing’s gone and my head isn’t throbbing like it was.” Drinking in her still sleepy blue eyes, “Merry Christmas.”

One side of her mouth curved up, lips pale in lingering exhaustion, “Merry Christmas. I’m glad you feel better.”

Whispering across the inches to her, “I love you and you have no idea how sorry I am for whatever I did. I don’t remember much but what I do remember makes me feel terrible and I’m sorry.”

Warm hand stroking down his cool cheek, “I love you, too. Don’t apologize. You can’t control your fever and what it makes you do.”

“I’m still sorry.” Leaving it at that, not wanting, at this point, to know what else he said or did, he moved his hand, pointing up to the headboard, “look at what Santa left you.”

Moving her head, she took in a dark matte-finished, round ornament, exquisitely painted with their house, trees, hammock, crooked front step, sagging roof painstakingly included down to the tiniest of details. Breathing out, tears prickled, threatened to fall but she held them in, smiling at the beauty, “I love it, Mulder. How did you do that?”

“Actually, I was talking to your mom about something or other a few months back and she mentioned she had a friend who paints and one thing led to another.” Reaching up to take it down for her to look at more closely, “Maggie had her ship it here and it came a few weeks back but I never got around to wrapping it so I decided to give it to you like this.”

In examining it, it suddenly blurred before her just as her head began swimming, spinning, pulsing. Having enough sense, she shut her eyes, handing the fragile glass back to Mulder, “I love it but I’m suddenly very dizzy. Did yours start like that?”

Rolling away and putting the ornament in the drawer with the first one, “yeah, it did.” Standing, he waited for a moment, then turned to her, “why don’t you get your pajamas on and get comfortable. It’s going to be an ugly few days.”

&&&&&&&&&

Mulder felt well enough to take care of Scully and by the 28th, they were wrapped up in blankets on the couch, enjoying their fireplace and hot chocolate and the fact that while Scully slept her fever away, Mulder had decorated. He’d taken the demolished tree parts and lined the mantle, placing other branches behind pictures, in the curtain rods of the windows. He then used their entire collection of stick-on hooks to hang all the ornaments on the large wall of the room, staggering them, arranging them in the most aesthetically pleasing pattern he could achieve, each one dangling from red and green yarn he’d rescued from his knitting bag.

Dozing against him, warm and wonderful, she mumbled into the darkened room around them, “thank you for taking care of me.”

As he kissed the top of her head, leaving his lips against her hair, “thank you for taking care of me.”

“And you like your ornament?”

“Of course. How could I not like a miniature ‘Big Blue’ hanging from my Christmas tree? I’m still amazed you remembered and managed to get them to send you one.”

“I remember everything Mulder, even the mythical sea monsters.”

Kissing her once again, “Merry Christmas, Scully.”

Through half a snore, “Merry Christmas, Mulder.”


End file.
